The New Hospital Programme has been tasked with transforming and modernising NHS healthcare facilities in England. Delivering it will require a clear and shared vision from the NHS Trusts, contractors, and suppliers involved. NHP head of Market Management, Emma Whigham, explains how the team developed its own ‘delivery scorecard’, ‘so that all sides fully understand the strategic aims and ambitions’
We are building a strong and diverse supply chain to secure success for the New Hospital Programme. It is an ambitious and complex initiative, with many stakeholders – including the supply chain, who all have a vested interest in delivering the hospitals of tomorrow. Our Programme Delivery Scorecard has been developed specifically for the New Hospital Programme. It is our version of the balanced scorecard, familiar to many in the major projects and construction sectors, and will help drive benefits realisation through the supply chain, creating the ability to monitor and manage delivery against a set of strategic outcomes. It articulates the outcomes and benefits we are seeking to achieve, and is a benchmark against which we can monitor our progress, ensuring that we can measure our success and deliver what we set out to deliver.
Benefits across ‘strategic themes’
The scorecard outlines the benefits of the Programme across strategic themes directly related to:
Government priorities.
New Hospital Programme-specific goals, such as building ‘intelligent’ hospitals.
Broader sustainability and social value ambitions
We have a clear vision for each strategic theme, together with metrics to measure our achievements, creating a direct link between our ambition and supply chain delivery. It is built in layers, beginning with the programme vision and mission, working its way down through strategic themes and critical success factors. Each critical success factor is underpinned by evaluation criteria and KPIs (key performance indicators) to help us choose the right suppliers for the right tasks.
It will also help the healthcare construction and procurement supply chain understand our expectations of what success looks like, and the way we will measure that success, and your role in it. It is a way to create trust by being transparent – providing a visual tool, so that you can clearly see what is expected, and how well that has been achieved. The Scorecard articulates the ‘golden thread’ which links the Programme Vision and Mission to the benefits articulated in the programme business case into critical success factors, and down through to the supply chain.
The Scorecard is built in layers, and filters from top to bottom. It starts with the Programme’s Vision: to transform how we deliver healthcare infrastructure for the future NHS. It is the very start of our golden thread. From the vision comes the Programme’s mission – to sustainably deliver critical national health infrastructure more efficiently, delivering improved value for money and enhancing social values by driving commonality, standard designs, productisation, and innovative technologies, to support transformational change for each hospital, patient, and staff member.
Strategic themes
We then flow down into the first section of mapping on the Scorecard, through the Programme’s Strategic Themes. These set out the ambitions and priorities for the Programme, and are aligned to policies, strategies, and industry best practice. Some of the strategic themes are cross-cutting, meaning that all organisational activities should be focussed on these. Other themes focus on areas or initiatives that affect some (rather than all) activities and the supply chain.
Our Programme-wide strategic themes are:
Delivering better and faster, creating future-proofed assets, and leaving a sustainable legacy.
Providing the environment for high-quality, modern, and sustainable healthcare
Industry-leading health, safety, and wellbeing.
Building foundations for enduring national capacity and capability.
The New Hospital Programme will achieve this through the efficient delivery of intelligent hospitals via Modern Methods of Construction. This will be underpinned by four key themes:
Enabling improved clinical care.
Digital focus.
Design leadership.
Delivery excellence.
Impactful sustainable development
This will create impactful sustainable development by ensuring that the new hospitals are:
Social and people-focused.
Driving economic benefits.
Environmentally responsible.
The Scorecard will be used to articulate the policies, strategies, and outputs of the New Hospital Programme to the widest stakeholder pool – both internal and external. Then, we flow down into the final, but most important, section of the visual scorecard – the Critical Success Factor section. The points are all aligned to the aforementioned strategic themes, but most importantly define the core benefits that will help drive and deliver the Programme’s strategic themes.
The critical success factors have been created, and are owned by, the heads of business units across the programme, and are articulated into specific targets, measures, opportunities, and challenges, that we want to embrace and resolve with the help of the supply chain. There are 27 different critical success factors – each one depicting a different benefit that the Programme team wants to see delivered for both the benefit of the Programme itself, and the legacy of healthcare infrastructure
This visual tool of the Scorecard is then underpinned by a library of Evaluation Criteria and accompanying key performance indicators. The Evaluation Criteria create the link between a stakeholder policy statement and the supply chain, meaning that you will be able to create a proposal to meet the demands set within the pre-qualification questionnaire and tendering stage. The key performance indicators are used within the contracts, and will be the metrics via which your commitment is managed, and your contribution to delivering the benefits is monitored and measured. This is the key phase that ensures that the golden thread does not break. The Scorecard provides a focal point for Programme priorities, shows the golden thread from business case through to benefits realisation, creates alignment, and fosters collaboration
Emma Whigham
As head of Market Management in the Commercial Directorate, Emma Whigham and her team ‘track, build, and nurture a strong, confident, and competitive market of suppliers and partners for the New Hospital Programme, creating an environment for the supply chain to invest with confidence, and allowing the market to collaborate and innovate’.
A Chartered Civil Engineer, she spent 17 years as Project, Programme and Transformation manager with Atkins, before becoming head of Change and Collaboration at HS2 (High Speed Two), where she led the development and implementation of delivery models. Her team ‘ensures that the market is ready to deliver the Programme’s new hospitals, that will integrate innovative national standards for NHS England’s healthcare infrastructure, delivering improved value for money and enhanced social value’
The scale of the New Hospital Programme will call on the skills and expertise of companies of all sizes, across a broad range of sectors. Suppliers can register their interest by completing the Supply Market Survey. Alternatively, if you would like to know more about the supply chain or future market engagement activity, email the Supplier Markets Team at nhp.suppliers@nhs.net